Hamilton: I was surprised, why no safety car?

Lewis Hamilton battled his way through the field on Sunday race, and was only just unable to beat Valtteri Bottas to second place, Hamilton’s second place cost, when he contact with McLaren’s Jenson Button midway through the race, and its resulted damage a vital part of his front wing.

“First of all, congratulations to Nico on winning his home race; it’s a special feeling and I am very proud that we could put both cars on the podium for Mercedes-Benz in Germany and represent for all the Mercedes employees and fans here this weekend.” Hamilton said after the race.

“From a personal point of view, I can’t be too ecstatic about the race because it has been a tough weekend for me and I’ve ultimately lost more points to Nico in the championship battle. But I’m grateful that I could limit the damage with a podium finish. When you are sitting on the grid basically in last place, with no other cars in your mirrors, it’s very hard to imagine that you could be standing up there two hours later.”

“I’m so grateful to the team for this car, I really take my hat off to them for building a machine that can put in that kind of performance.” He added

“To be honest, it was a pretty straightforward race for me, although I had some trouble following what was going on and where I was running at times. I had a nice battle with Kimi early on, when I was lucky not to damage the front wing, then the incident with Jenson was just unfortunate. He has been such a gentleman this year and not given me too much trouble getting past but it was just a misunderstanding today.

I wasn’t close enough to try and pass but I was on the inside line in the corner. It looked like he had gone wide, then he cut back across the corner and perhaps he didn’t see me there. I lost quite a bit of down-force with the damage and it made it very hard to look after the front left tyre. I had a lot of understeer and the tyre was degrading fast, which is the reason why we converted from a two-stop strategy to three.” The Brit added

“Then the team called me in early on the first set of option tyres because we expected a Safety Car to come out – and I was surprised that there wasn’t one, to be honest I caught Valtteri pretty fast in the final laps but he just had too much straightline speed to get past. I’m doing absolutely everything I can to get back on level terms with Nico in the title battle: I can’t focus more or work harder than I am doing right now. This championship is proving a big challenge for me but that’s how I love it – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”